Electronic Book Review - bachelardhttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/bachelard
enAbove Us Only Sky: On Camus, U2, Lennon, Rock, and Rilkehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/musicsoundnoise/awake
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<div class="field-item even">Tim Keane</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-03-17</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="epigraph"><span class="lightEmphasis">And I felt ready to live it all again too;</span> for the first time <span class="lightEmphasis">, in that night alive with stars and signs, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself - so like a brother, really - I felt that I was happy again.</span><br /> -Albert Camus <span class="booktitle">The Stranger</span></p>
<p class="epigraph"><span class="lightEmphasis">My father is a rich man<br /> He wears a rich man’s cloak<br /> Gave me the keys to his Kingdom (coming)<br /> Gave me a cup of gold<br /> He said “I have many mansions”<br /> And there are many rooms to see<br /> But I left by the back door<br /> And I threw away the key</span><br /> -U2 ” <span class="emphasis">The First Time</span> “</p>
<p>The Catholic liturgy, like the soaring monotony of Gregorian chants, is an anesthetic to the young body that absorbs its somnolent and effusive and florid reassurances about the Holy Ghost, The Blessed Sacraments, The Glory, The Lord, The Kingdom and Life Everlasting. Awareness of one’s physical existence is dissolved by the Church’s hypnotic music.</p>
<p>The Catholic Virgin may be the Holy Spirit’s muse, of course, but puberty gifted me with an irreligious impulse back toward my body. So from that moment in 1980 when I read its opening sentences, Albert Camus’ <span class="booktitle">The Stranger</span> was, to my thirteen year old eyes (and ears) a physical experience, like a rock anthem, of the <span class="lightEmphasis">a priori</span> irrationality and meaninglessness of human existence. Born for no reason, bound to die for no reason, the rest was entirely up to me. There was no God, no heaven, no hell. Not only <span class="lightEmphasis">could</span> I make it all up: from here on, I <span class="lightEmphasis">had</span> to make it up.</p>
<p>So blown back was I by its irreligious threnodies and liberating hedonistic rhapsodies that I was oblivious about the novel’s allegory of French colonialism in Algeria and the subtle textual challenges of amorality, irony and absurdity. The novel’s white-knuckle anger and earth-bound, lyrical uplifts are <span class="lightEmphasis">sounds</span>, truly, which I associated then (and still do) with the acid-bath solo of a Gibson SG Special: The Who’s 1969 blistering, angry performance of an existential rock “opera” at the peace-loving Utopia of Woodstock. <cite id="note_1">For further viewing, check out the digitally restored performance by The Who at Woodstock, New York in 1969, in Jeff Stein’s <span class="booktitle">The Kids Are Alright</span>. The Who’s violent performance leaves the nearly speechless festival MC intoning, as the band exits the stage, “Ladies and gentleman… The Who”</cite></p>
<p>Camus’ disbeliever, Meursault, facing the guillotine, gets in the face of a priest who has visited him in his cell to implore him to atone with God:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">something inside of me snapped. I started yelling at the top of my lungs and I insulted him and told him not to waste his prayers on me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I was pouring out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger, cries of joy. He seemed so certain about everything, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head. He wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man (<span class="booktitle">The Stranger</span> 121).</p>
<p>At the tender age of thirteen I was challenged by Camus to look ahead to the cold finality of my inevitable death, that “dark wind that had been rising toward [me] from somewhere in the future, across years that were still to come” and give up Catholicism’s tender simplicities and middle-class snobbery and accept, as Meursault realizes (like some bastard offspring of Proust) that “everybody was privileged” (121) simply by <span class="lightEmphasis">existing</span>, and that rather than depressing me interminably, unredeemed mortality could induce the same physical bliss which music works on my brain.</p>
<p>If I had that moral courage, like Meursault, to reject illusions about an after-life and <span class="lightEmphasis">face the music</span> I too would <span class="lightEmphasis">wake up</span> in a kind of ecstasy “with stars in [my] face. Sounds of the countryside drifting in. Smells of night, earth, and salt air…cooling my temples” (<span class="booktitle">The Stranger</span> 122).</p>
<p>It helped my teenage sensibility that Camus’ biography, which I borrowed from my neighborhood library in the Bronx, resembled that of a rock star’s.</p>
<p>I was transported reading about Camus’ work with the French Resistance and his international “smash hit” <span class="booktitle">L’etranger</span> earning him street cred and media fame while his follow-up “releases,” like <span class="booktitle">L’homme revolte</span> and <span class="booktitle">Le Mythe de Sisphye</span>, all of them humanistic texts that propose hope and existence for their own sakes, earned increasingly dismissive reviews from the hippest literati and post-modern intelligentsia of his age, including Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.</p>
<p>And like an existential novel itself, the narrative ended with the photogenic media star-and-novelist-as-global-celebrity killed in a fatal car crash en route to Paris at the age of forty-six.</p>
<p>Music is existence made more.</p>
<p>The existential writers who followed in Albert Camus’ wake were all musicians of the word. That never-recovering Catholic Jean Genet. The jazz master of Spanish prose, Julio Cortazar. The visionary existential poet and Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah. And the American Beat Generation. And the existential impulses that underwrite the blues, R’n’B, rock, and rap. Which is all fitting. Because Camus’ writing is lyrical in that ancient Greek sense: melody, language turned to choral song.</p>
<p>Reading and re-reading Camus’ <span class="booktitle">Lyrical Essays</span> today, I hear an almost old fashioned engagement with being alive and a human being writing out of what Nietzsche calls that “bliss born of pain spoken from the heart of nature,” (<span class="booktitle">Birth of Tragedy</span> 27), and, like music, such writing is a stepping outside of the convention of time, toward what Camus calls an ethic of existing in an absurd universe only for “something for which it is worth the trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue, music, dance, reason, the mind.” For music is a romance with finality, and by extension, an immersion in experiences which give meaning in and of themselves by a</p>
<p class="longQuotation">[l]osing oneself in that bottomless certainty [of one’s death and] feeling sufficiently remote from one’s own life to increase it and take a broad view of it - this involves the principle of a liberation… The <span class="lightEmphasis">divine</span> [italics mine] availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early dawn, that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure flame of life…[all] that which a human heart can experience and live (<span class="booktitle">The Myth of Sisyphus</span> 59-60).</p>
<p>This musical-existential impulse is behind Kerouac, in <span class="work-title">Mexico City Blues</span>, as much as in <span class="work-title">On the Road</span>, in the happy despair of the jazz club where the narrator interrogates himself with:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">what’s this thing we’re doing in this sad brown world?…here we are dealing with the pit and the prune-juice of poor beat life itself in the god awful streets of man, so he said it and sang it, “Close-your-” and blew it way up to the ceiling and through the stars and on and out - “ey-y-y-y-y-es”-and staggered off the platform to brood. He sat in the corner with a bunch of boys and paid no attention to them. He looked down and wept. He was the greatest (<span class="booktitle">On the Road</span> 200).</p>
<p>Think of the existentialism of James Baldwin too - “Sonny’s Blues,” and its jazz-loving heroin-addict Harlem virtuoso who through a live jam session finally earns a bitter reconciliation with his brother, if not generations of American blacks before him (and for any reader who has spent enough time in intellectual ghettos):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood at last, that he could help us to be free if we could listen… And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky (“Sonny’s Blues” 696).</p>
<p>Which ties Sonny’s Greenwich Village blues to music as a celebration of our existence under an open sky.</p>
<p>Or to use John Lennon’s phrase, “above us only sky.”</p>
<p>Or African skies, to be more musically precise, as proved by Nathaniel Mackey’s miraculous text <span class="work-title">The Bedouin Hornbook</span>, a journal of a jazz musician performing live in the run-down venues and shopping malls of postwar America.</p>
<p>In Mackey’s journey John Coltrane fills in as a Jesus figure, for Mackey’s text is also a God-seeking philosophical diary written to “The Angel of Dust,” as its feeling-thinker re-integrates American music’s existential impulses with Asian instruments and African jubilations, that word “jubilation” itself rooted in the ram’s horn, and music becomes an activity for “The Slave’s Day Off.” Music is described as the song of the jackal, (as Marcel Griaule tells Mackey), that four-legged singing animal, the jackal, the son of God, who wanted speech and so he “stole the fibres of which language was embodied,” and if you listen to the jackal’s singing you hear him as the diviner of God’s design, and if you “play around with prophetic music…you moisten your mouth with the jackal’s kiss” (<span class="booktitle">Bedouin Hornbook</span> 66).</p>
<p>And Mackey reminds us that a certain African theology informs us that the drumbeats “accent absence” through the “unsounded beat,” and thus make our hearts beat faster by both letting us hear the abyss of silence that waits for us (in death) and answering that absence with a drumbeat (in existence), so that drumming intensifies our own heart rate as we hear it, literally giving the heart more life.</p>
<p>The drum skin, in African Gogon teaching, is God’s ear. Mackey concludes that the drum (and music itself) is emblematic of the musician’s existential-divinity: the drum the musician plays for that God with no ears (that <span class="lightEmphasis">Deus absconditus</span>) revives the absent God through the rhythmic music it makes. As Mackey points out, the human musician invents his God-audience by embodying “Him” because “to drum is to slap hands with God,” a God who all the while is the human music-maker himself. (<span class="booktitle">Bedouin Hornbook</span> 165-166)</p>
<p>Mackey writes of music as the body’s power and the gospel style’s “wordless moan,” and the singer’s falsetto as “the inchoate arcana intuitively buried within the reaches - the wordless reaches of the black singer’s voice,” the solos of “circular breathing,” from the snake charmer’s trick,” on a South Indian oboe, so music is an existential legacy we still live, a legacy from a continent stripped of its original languages and its land literally “alienated” by its conquerors (54, 67).</p>
<p>As a sourcebook of music, African histories are then no different from Ireland’s bardic tradition, those Druid musicians, many of who believed that poets, not priests granted immortality, these “pagans” who were fought by St. Patrick and were scorned by the English colonists as living anti-theses of the supposedly civilizing effects of the musician Orpheus and his “wholesome precepts” (<span class="booktitle">Modern Ireland</span> 28).</p>
<p>As Yeats reminds us, the English colonizing of Ireland’s bardic heritage turned out to be “good for the world, bad for the nation,” for in the resistances and irrepressible energies of Irish music one hears “the persistence of Celtic passion: a man loves or hates until he falls into the grave.” (<span class="booktitle">Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth</span> 53)</p>
<p>Oblivious to the power of Irish music for most of my life, and about one year after I read <span class="work-title">The Stranger</span> in the summer of 1980, I caught wind of U2’s first album, <span class="booktitle">Boy</span>. At first, I resisted this band who seemed to market themselves as Irish evangels.</p>
<p>But when I bought <span class="booktitle">Boy</span> in 1982, I found rock-n-roll validating what I’d valued in Camus’ prose: lyrical anger, a religion of alive-ness, a defiance somehow welcoming, guitars mimicking church bells, evocations of Godless streets, poetry of stars and shadows and nights like those flourishes late in <span class="work-title">The Stranger</span>, and a focused, marching Irish blues underscored by a lumbering bass, and clean production arrangements intensified by Bono’s un-cool emotionalism and Larry Mullen Jr’s military drumbeats.</p>
<p>“Walls of white protest,” Bono sings in “Shadows and Tall Trees,” “A gravestone in name/Who is it now?/It’s always the same.”</p>
<p>Serving as a soundtrack for my existential fear of a Reagan-Russian nuclear winter, “A Day Without Me,” lamented “the world I left behind… Wipe their eyes and then let go.”</p>
<p>And here was a band with the balls to veto The Who’s commandment to “die before I get old” through <span class="booktitle">Boy</span> ‘s single “Out of Control” which turns rock from apathy to a will-to-live: “Monday morning, eighteen years old/woke the world with bawling//… I fought fate/There’s blood at the garden gate/The man said childhood/It’s in his childhood.” All those power chords, propulsive bass, thunderous percussion, and a singer singing his way into body’s finality: “My body grows and grows/It frightens me…” Bono sings in “Twilight,” echoing the sentiments of “Out of Control,” “One day I’ll die/ The choice will not be mine/ Will it be too late?”</p>
<p>The album’s first FM hit, “I Will Follow” conflated mad love for a lost God, a lost mother and a lover into a chorus which still sounds to me like nothing less than moving forward the mortal body’s happy fate.</p>
<p class="epigraph"><span class="lightEmphasis">…we live a poetic existentialism. In our reverie which imagines while remembering, our past takes on substance again. Over and above the picturesque, the bonds between the world and the human soul are strong. Then there lives within us not a memory of history but a memory of the cosmos.</span><br /> -Gaston Bachelard <span class="work-title">The Poetics of Reverie</span></p>
<p class="epigraph"><span class="lightEmphasis">I’m looking for the sound that’s gonna drown out the world… still looking for the face I had before the world was made</span><br /> -U2 “Mofo” (1997)</p>
<p>Music is a tool for our body’s existence. Commuters, pedestrians, runners, travelers with wires dangling from out of their ears, Ipods, MP3 players, Discmans, and hands gripping digital display counters and control dials, then the beeps and the alarms, and, sometimes, leaking from under the earpieces, the preludes of Debussy, the pile-driving metal of Papercut Homicide, the funk of Black-Eyed Peas, the machismo of R-Kelly.</p>
<p>Stripped of their ordinariness and conventionality, we can see these devices for what they are: portable machines attached to human <span class="lightEmphasis">bodies</span>, serving a physiological function, as do dialysis machines or infusion pumps. Music as a life support machine. Or even Pete Townshend’s rock-opera-metaphor: music as “miracle cure” to treat the existential symptoms of livingness: boredom, anxiety, torpor, loneliness, vacuity, depression.</p>
<p>Music literally, <span class="lightEmphasis">neurologically</span>, is an opium of the people, “reconnecting” the overworked mind to the underused <span class="lightEmphasis">body</span> in a time when most other technology brings us “closer” to other bodies by disembodied voice messages or blips on 19-inch monitors or words sent to our Outlook’s Inbox.</p>
<p>Music as metaphor for healing colors the deathbed settings on U2’s <span class="booktitle">How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb</span>, as in “Miracle Drug,” with its political subtext about the DATA organization’s attempts to sidestep international patent laws and pharmaceutical intransigence to get rare combination drugs to the sub-Saharan African AIDS pandemic: 6,500 dead today, 6,500 dead tomorrow. <cite id="note_2">See The Data: Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa at <a href="http://www.data.org/flash.php?CMP=KNL-DATA" class="outbound">www.data.org/flash.php?CMP=KNL-DATA</a>, the organization Bono co-founded.</cite></p>
<p>Add to this the song’s other existential subtext, the miracle drug Lioresal, a muscle relaxant sometimes given to patients who suffer neurological damage and illnesses such as MS., administered once in Dublin, Ireland, around 1976, to an eleven year old paraplegic poet named Christopher Nolan whose nervous system had suffered such irreparable damage during his birth, that it left him “[g]azing out through the crystal window of his eyes, a spectator before the world…unable to respond, to comment, to reply. Image upon image ricocheted round his skull and burned into his consciousness. Without means of expression, the pressure to communicate was intolerable.” (<span class="booktitle">Dam Burst of Dreams</span>, 2).</p>
<p>The Lioresal injections allowed Nolan to lift his head enough that soon he was typing with the help of a “unicorn” fitted to his forehead, his inner words giving way to typed words, passages and to finally a book, <span class="booktitle">The Dam-Burst of Dreams</span> - award-winning poems, prose pieces, and theater pieces of the mind-as-body, muscular, musical, writing echoing Gerard Manley Hopkins alliterative psalms.</p>
<p>Other texts in <span class="booktitle">Dam-Burst</span> climb toward Nolan’s own reconstituted and downright jazzy versions of God: “Mammoth, notable, immediate vexed questions/bear answering,/Census point to new heady awareness in cloistered/irrelevancy,/Could you imagine nothing of God in the/wonderful future - you could?”</p>
<p>All of this puts “Miracle Drug,” and Nolan’s work, in the spirit of Gaston Bachelard’s “existentialism of the poetic” and its reveries and its “living in a life which dominates life, in a duration which does not endure” (<span class="booktitle">Poetics of Reverie</span> 120) because music reminds us that ecstasy and reverie, or “that doubling of the self” are the body’s gift to existence.</p>
<p>Scientist and musician Robert Jourdain underscores this doubling, or physical intensification of existence by music, as he tells of a Parkinson’s patient, who told Oliver Sacks that music allowed her to</p>
<p class="longQuotation">partake of other people, as I partake of the music. Whether it is others, in their own natural movement, or the movement of music itself, the feeling of movement, of living movement, is communicated to me. And not just movement, but existence itself. (<span class="booktitle">Music the Brain Ecstasy</span> 301)</p>
<p>Her Parkinson’s disease responded to no treatment other than the “the sound of music from a wireless or a gramophone” which led to a “complete disappearance” of her symptoms until, “freed of her automatisms,” she “smilingly ‘conducted the music’ or rose and danced to it” (301). Jourdain details how the debilitated woman’s “miraculous” responses to the music were elicited not by the music in itself as sound but (as it is for all of us) by her nervous system’s anticipation of those sounds.</p>
<p>Music is what Jourdain calls our brain’s “kinesthetic anticipation” of it, in which “we use our musculatures to represent music. Modeling the most important features of musical patterns by means of physical movement large and small” (303).</p>
<p>Our brains - our bodies - literally <span class="lightEmphasis">become</span> the music we hear. Mozart’s symphonies and McCartney’s melodies were neurological experiences within their respective physical bodies, composed as “music” through their nervous systems, recorded and performed by their bodies, they are then passed <span class="lightEmphasis">in</span> to us, as the “[m]usic arrives in our nervous systems and causes our brains to generate a flood of anticipations by which we make sense of melody and harmony and rhythm and form,” and in how, in response to the “kinesthetic anticipations,” (303) the brain defensively releases endorphins, which, when not needed to combat pain, produce euphoria, precisely as opiates work on the addict’s brain.</p>
<p>So I hear U2’s “Bad,” the hypnotic synthesizer loop which provides a fluid counterpoint to incremental sharp guitar ringing and bass and drum crescendos as surrealistic lyrics mimic the bliss inside an expressionistic painter’s mind or the high points of a heroin addict’s fix (or both) to find, musically, what sound like a virtual experience of God or, more likely, a redefined physical existence on the other end of a rock song.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Wide Awake in America</span> - on more levels than one.</p>
<p>If music is so naturally productive for the human body, what about the urge, also raised by U2’s music, to “Wake Up, Dead Man.” A dirge from <span class="booktitle">Pop</span>, evoking a “fucked up world” and the nightmare of pop/rock musical culture and its canon of “died-before-they-got-old,”: Elvis, Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, Moon, Lennon, not to mention the suicides of musician’s of U2’s generation, including Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, Stuart Adamson of Big Country, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, Michael Hutchence of INXS, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Wake up dead man</span> - and think of the cynical invocation and “uses” of death within the pop music industry: the punk or grunge disgust with the body, promoted lately by Courtney Love but long ago predicted by Bob Dylan: “To her, death is quite romantic/She wears an iron vest/Her profession’s her religion/Her sin is her lifelessness.” And the <span class="lightEmphasis">poète maudit</span> ennui of the black clad Romantics and the Goths. And the night-of-the-living-dead histrionics of heavy metal and thrash. And the nihilistic rage felt on behalf of imprisoned American black men (sent to jail at rates 27 to 57 times higher than white men) <cite id="note_3">Incarcerated America.” <span class="journaltitle">Human Rights Watch Background Report</span>, April 2003.</cite> and economic and criminal justice systems so flagrantly racist that all this might <span class="lightEmphasis">start</span> to explain rap artist KRS-ONE’s ugly public statements about the 2001 terrorist attacks:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">911 effected (sic) them down the block; the rich, the powerful those that are oppressing us as a culture. Sony, RCA or BMG, Universal, the radio stations, Clear Channel, Viacom with BET and MTV, those are our oppressors those are the people that we’re trying to overcome in Hiphop everyday, this is a daily thing. We cheered when 911 happened in New York and say that proudly here. Because when we were down at the trade center we were getting hit over the head by cops, told that we can’t come in this building, hustled down to the train station because of the way we dressed and talked, and so on, we were racially profiled. So, when the planes hit the building we were like; mmmm justice.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Wake up dead man</span>, indeed. There’s the death-threats implied by the stage and media personae projected by gangsta rappers which sometimes parallel their actual lives - Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur - Shakur gunned down in Las Vegas over ten years ago and now very much re-presented as a contradictory and Christ-like cultural artifact in Lauren Lazin’s film <span class="filmtitle">Resurrection</span>.</p>
<p>Maybe death is merely a pop music fetish.</p>
<p>But a fetish is a response to a taboo.</p>
<p>Think of the American taboos against aging, dying and death that drive our economy, and the capitalist-Puritan ethos which assures us that those who work hard and succeed materially are the ones (the believers and the heroes, perhaps) who are likeliest to be saved, “the elect,” who gain everlasting life. Hands to work, heart to God, as the old Shaker truism goes. And as the theologian J. Leslie Dunstan interprets capitalism and Calvin, “Labour is asceticism, an asceticism which is absolutely necessary. Profit is a sign of the blessing of God on the faithful exercise of one’s calling” (<span class="booktitle">Protestantism</span> 134). <cite id="note_4">The exposé of capitalism’s underwriting by Calvinism is as old as Max Weber’s landmark 1903 book <span class="booktitle">The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism</span>. A new book, <span class="booktitle">American Mania: When More is Not Enough</span>, by Dr. Peter C. Whybrow of The University of California extends this project by exploring the dangerous psychopathology of post-1990s American consumerism.</cite></p>
<p>Stay alive not so you can <span class="lightEmphasis">exist</span> but so you can get and spend: hence the formulae of reality TV, that whoever has the most toys wins and by winning, doesn’t “die.” The loser who fails at the rigged capitalist enterprise “goes home” (read goes to “hell”) while the winner stays “alive” (i.e., remains live, as a celebrity, on television).</p>
<p>To be unemployed, to be without a “career,” to be “fired” or to be broke, are symbolically, American ideas of death.</p>
<p>Actual death, in contemporary American narrative and discourse, doesn’t happen: it is pure taboo: death has no actuality.</p>
<p>By existential standards winning isn’t anything.</p>
<p>By American standards any kind of winning is everything.</p>
<p>Winning is a mark of immortality. Money, shopping, owning are the most valued kinds of winning. Just watch those televised relay races at the local strip malls at sunup the day after “Thanksgiving.”</p>
<p>Americans’ physical existences and certainly the physical existences of people outside American borders are a marketer-and-minister’s afterthought, at best.</p>
<p>The only force The Good Reverend/CEO needs you to accept is His faith, made yours, that as long as you keep working and buying (consumption completes and validates work) you have earned your salvation in God’s eyes (your self will never <span class="lightEmphasis">die</span>).</p>
<p>Which might explain that while Former President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair made it to Davos, Switzerland on February 24, 2005 to sit alongside Bono and African leaders Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki and President Olusegun Obesanjo to speak to the world about what the West needs to do to stop human beings dying of AIDS (at numbers that rival the Bubonic Plague), President Bush was mysteriously absent, perhaps fearful of being called to the carpet for his failure to deliver fully on promised aid to Africa, though the Associated Press that same day was informing anyone who was listening that the U.S. President’s uncle “made more than $450,000 last month by selling stock in a defense contractor whose profits are growing because of the Iraq war” (“Bush’s Uncle Profits from Iraq Stock Sale” by Matt Kelley, Associated Press, February 24 2005).</p>
<p>Freedom is a primary word in the diction of existentialists like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. But the word “freedom” as it’s used by President Bush and by extension the American intelligentsia and media who parrot him, is not a reference to those existential rights or political freedoms laid out in the U.S. Constitution: rather his “freedom” (as in a “free Iraq”) is a code for faith in the free market, a form of American slavery warned against by that existential prophet Henry David Thoreau in “Life Without Principles.”</p>
<p>Or to put the matter more simply, as the Sex Pistols did, nearly thirty years ago, “Your future scheme’s a shopping dream.”</p>
<p>And Public Enemy warned “don’t believe the hype.”</p>
<p>But the ongoing pop/musical embrace of the establishment’s free market “hype” is by now so ubiquitous that you can watch the rap star, on reruns of MTV’s “Cribs,” showing you the massive bowling alley he’s built into his mansion’s sprawling sub-basement. And read the signifiers of conformity: Dave Navarro sporting a Jesus T-shirt during an appearance on Bravo’s “Celebrity Poker Showdown” and Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins who’s given up on rock music and is now writing poetry and thanking his God on the volume’s frontispiece.</p>
<p>This consummated marriage of pop music culture to the puritan establishment is exposed and sometimes satirized in Paul Beatty’s novel <span class="booktitle">Tuff</span>. Fariq, that novel’s “disenfranchised” handicapped anti-hero, gives a fuck-all rant that espouses the very practices The President is citing in his push to end the Social Security benefit: “A prudent motherfucker like me has an IRA account, some short term T-bills, a grip invested in long-term corporate bonds and high-risk foreign stock. Shit, the twenty-first century nigger gots to have a diversified portfolio” (9).</p>
<p class="epigraph"><span class="lightEmphasis">He who dedicates himself to this history dedicates himself to nothing and, in his turn, is nothing. But he who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains the world again and again. Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests.</span><br /> -Albert Camus, <span class="booktitle">The Rebel</span></p>
<p class="epigraph"><span class="lightEmphasis">…punks find that they must reintegrate themselves into the real world and in doing so end up purchasing many of the same commodities they once scoffed… Clearly no one held a gun to the head of Iggy Pop (who advertised for Nike) or forced Black Flag to sell their classic song “Rise Above” to a manufacturer of video games… Advertisers, being fairly astute, tried to create a connection between the (presumed) counter-cultural activities of their audiences’ youth in order to identify consumption with rebellion. And, as with Nike’s use of “Revolution” a decade earlier, some fussed and cried sellout… As Simon Frith notes, rock music has always ‘articulated the reconciliation of rebelliousness and capital.’</span><br /> -Brian Cogan “What Do I Get? Punk Rock, Authenticity and Future of Capital” at Counterblast</p>
<p class="epigraph"><span class="lightEmphasis">…the only thing worse than a rock star is a rock star with a conscience - a celebrity with a cause - a placard-waving, knee-jerking, fellow-traveling activist with a Lexus and a swimming pool shaped like his head… Music…still keeps me from falling asleep in the comfort of my freedom. Rock music to me is rebel music. But rebelling against what? In the Fifties it was sexual mores and double standards. In the Sixties it was the Vietnam War and racial and social inequality. What are we rebelling against now? If I am honest, I’m rebelling against my own indifference. I am rebelling against the idea that the world is the way the world is and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it… But fighting my indifference is my own problem. What’s your problem?</span><br /> -Bono, <span class="journaltitle">Harvard Magazine</span> (transcript of Bono’s Commencement Address at Harvard University, 26 June 2001</p>
<p>Can the corporate busy-ness of rock/media celebrity sustain the existential promises of fiction, art, poetry and music? Especially when, to paraphrase Paul Beatty, there are portfolios and there are <span class="lightEmphasis">portfolios</span>.</p>
<p>U2’s estimated cash worth, according to a 2001 report by <span class="journaltitle">Forbes</span>, is somewhere near $700 million, and by now must have crossed well over the billion dollar mark. The band has cultivated crossover deals and run a publicity machine that has for decades stayed steps ahead of the print and new media outlets who cover them. Add Web-based distribution ventures and multi-media product-placement, alliances with Hollywood and European film industries (from the <span class="booktitle">Rattle and Hum</span> bio-pic to <span class="filmtitle">The Batman</span> and <span class="filmtitle">Tomb Raider</span> franchises to production ventures with auteurs Wim Wenders and Martin Scorcese), NFL tie-ins (from the 2002 Super Bowl performance to music promos during game breaks), distribution deals with and commercials for Apple Computers (who super-charged their iPod and iTunes music distribution businesses with alliances with U2 and Universal Records), real-estate investments throughout Dublin (a city which has boomed in almost direct parallel to the band’s ascension), and you end up with U2 sold and bought and downloaded and performed live in nearly every “industrialized” nation on the planet.</p>
<p>Yet if the rebel rock band as multinational corporation creates its own built-in contradictions, it’s also worth acknowledging that the critical interpretations of pop musicians as signifying “brands,” or worse, as Rorschach tests for the collective conscious, (as in Ira Robbins silly description of U2 as “a cosmic sociology project”) <cite id="note_5">Alternative/progressive music critic and publisher of Trouser Press, Ira Robbins has written a detailed biographical essay on U2’s career, which gives needed attention to some of the band’s lesser known songs and important recordings, though the essay’s pseudo-semiotics and hyperbole undercut much of the writing: <a href="http://www.trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=u2" class="outbound">www.trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=u2</a>.</cite> pass so quickly as to be, in retrospect, more parody than profound, as surely will the 1,000-plus often bizarre customer reviews currently posted on amazon.com about U2’s latest release.</p>
<p>Pop ” <span class="lightEmphasis">zeitgeists</span> ” and the “semiotics” of pop culture date faster than skim milk. Does anyone waste time parsing the American fundamentalist’s violent response to John Lennon’s ironic quip that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ? Or Norman Mailer’s explication of Mick Jagger as “the white nigger”? Or Frank Zappa v. Tipper Gore? And when was the last time someone consulted Camille Paglia’s <span class="booktitle">Sex, Art, and American Culture</span> to get a closer “reading” of Madonna?</p>
<p>It is history, not critics or even the band’s PR machine, that has given context to U2’s musical existentialism. <span class="booktitle">Boy</span> hit the U.S. shops four months after John Lennon was gunned down in Manhattan, and two months before Bob Marley died of cancer in Kingston, and by 1981, the 1960s and 1970s energies of rock were artistically, culturally, and politically winding down. If guitar-centered artists were making exceptional and even political records (The Clash’s <span class="booktitle">Sandinista</span> and Talking Heads’ <span class="booktitle">Remain in Light</span>, to name just two), the confrontational, <span class="lightEmphasis">existential</span> rage of the punk era had dissipated.</p>
<p>Yet the early 1980s were the height of Thatcher’s extreme-right regime in the U.K. including violent industrial union strikes in the North of England and internationally-monitored IRA hunger strikes in Belfast’s H-blocks. Ronald Reagan’s vast nuclear build-up was underway, as was the promotion by U.S. politicians of Christian fundamentalism, which coincided with record unemployment and deep economic recession.</p>
<p>Into all this, U2’s spy-plane moniker and allusive, French Symbolist-inspired lyrics placed them as rock artists who could go beyond the dichotomies and sectarianism of both Northern Ireland and of the Cold War.</p>
<p>In fact, U2’s best love songs transcend the genre’s formula and respond to the questions and conflicts of the Northern Irish “Troubles,” a political songwriting tendency hinted at by Bono’s frequent references to the struggle growing up with a Protestant mother and a Catholic father. <cite id="note_6">Bono interviewed on World AIDS Day, December 10, 2002 on Larry King Live, CNN. During the interview, he speaks openly about his private conception of faith and his ongoing rejection of organized religion.</cite> So whose “Two Hearts Beat as One” in that rhythmic lamentation from the <span class="booktitle">War</span> album?</p>
<p>U2’s Romantic anthems and dirges about betrayal, pleas for Irish homecoming and allusions to a unified Ireland implied in early songs like “New Year’s Day,” (“torn in two/we can be one”) and “40” (“I will sing a new song”) become much more explicit criticisms of IRA fascist tendencies and British dominance over The North in songs from the late 1990s like “Please” (“your holy war”) and “Staring at the Sun” (“military’s still in town/armor plated suits and ties/Daddy just won’t say good-bye).</p>
<p>“Sunday Bloody Sunday,” is an homage to thirteen non-violent Catholic protestors killed by the British Army in Derry on January 30, 1972, an event that helped radicalize Irish Catholic opposition to the British occupation and Protestant dominance over the region.</p>
<p>With the IRA’s “decommissioning” stalled, that song’s question - “How long must we sing this song?” remains unanswered: yet that “we” is a single, collective Irish pronoun referring to those in the conflict without political or economic power, namely Catholics loyal to the Irish Republic.</p>
<p>Once content to wave a neutral white flag from the stage, Bono has taken to holding up the Irish tricolor flags thrown to him by fans during concerts - the flag for which most Irish Protestants in the North have little use and the flag for which generations of Republican leaders were imprisoned by the British for parading. But these distinctly Irish existential, political blues aren’t the only theme of U2’s best music: suicide, exile, erotic love, and even perestroika were behind 1983’s <span class="booktitle">War</span>, and then with the help of Brian Eno and his ambient theories of composition, the band referenced the American atrocities of the Hiroshima bombing and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination as contexts for their 1984 LP <span class="booktitle">Unforgettable Fire</span>. In 1988, the band scored a radio hit with a song about the demise of blues legend Billie Holiday “Angel of Harlem” and they went on to cover songs by Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, and Lou Reed.</p>
<p>Postwar existential art and ideas have inspired most of U2’s strongest music from the 1990s.</p>
<p>Dedicated to Delmore Schwartz (whose book <span class="booktitle">In Dreams Begin Responsibilities</span> supplies the song’s chorus) “Acrobat” (1991) is a tumult of anger and hope working against the uselessness of religion (“I’d break bread and wine if there was a church I could receive in”).</p>
<p>“Until the End of the World”(1991) borrows the conceit of Nikos Kazantzakis’ <span class="filmtitle">The Last Temptation of Christ</span>, to show up the existential heroics of Judas (“We broke the bread/we drank the wine/everybody having a good time/except you, you were talking about the end of the world”) while far as one can be from sentimentality “One” renounces every illusion of immortality, from romantic love to religious faith, in favor of life for living’s sake (“One life you got to do what you should”): the song’s existential credo was highlighted during live performances by the display of writer David Wojnarowicz’s aphorism “smell the flowers while you can.”</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Zooropa</span> (1993), the band’s follow-up to <span class="booktitle">Achtung Baby</span> is dedicated to Charles Bukowski and lives out the energies of Bukowski’s hedonistic mania, that album closing with “The Wanderer” in which Johnny Cash sings as a Christian crusader out to kill his better self and whoever else crosses his path, “with a Bible and a gun.” And European genocide is the subject of “Miss Sarajevo.” (1995)</p>
<p>The videos for <span class="booktitle">Pop</span> (1997) feature swansong cameos from William Burroughs in “Last Night on Earth” and Allen Ginsberg in “Miami.” The songs on <span class="booktitle">Pop</span> celebrate the end of faith and religion (“Gone” and “Mofo”), and C.S. Lewis’ <span class="booktitle">Screwtape Letters</span> show up as a hopeless talisman in the animated “Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me” video (1995), a song which ridicules Messiah-narratives of American pop (“they want you to play Jesus/and go down on one knee/but they’ll want their money back if you’re alive at thirty-three/and your turning tricks with your crucifix, you’re a star”).</p>
<p>And U2’s live shows bring the existential ethic into sports arena spectacle. Their 1992 American tour ridiculed then-President Bush, projecting his image on a jumbo screen and over-dubbing his voice with that of the late Freddie Mercury (who had died of AIDS less than a year before): “We will - we will - rock you.</p>
<p>Their performances throughout the 1990s featured the artwork of Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons to highlight America’s moral hypocrisy about AIDS while those same shows raised money for Amnesty International, Greenpeace and Rock the Vote. Performances included Bono, dressed as “Macphisto,” staging phone calls to the United Nations during live hooks up with victims under siege in Bosnia, and the band has advocated on behalf of Viet Namese poet Nguyen Chi Thien, Burmese author and activist Aung San Suu Kyi and novelist Salman Rushdie, who was invited on stage while he was living under the Iranian government’s fatwa of death for his writing of <span class="booktitle">The Satanic Verses</span>.</p>
<p>Despite these existential, engagé sensibilities, U2’s conventional approach to recording and touring allow the band-as-corporation to recruit from an ever-widening consumer base in conservative America, a demographic that is often politically indifferent or even politically opposed to the band’s views.</p>
<p>In the 1980s, when Bono denounced underground U.S. support for the IRA, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and Reagan’s illegal wars in Central America, his onstage rhetoric backfired on the band’s media image, and almost cost the band its captive consumer base in America.</p>
<p>In decades since, he has retreated from public political statements in order to trade on his rock celebrity to leverage financial and moral support from neo-conservative power (Bush, the Pope, Jessie Helms) for his push for AIDS medicine for Africa and third world debt-relief initiative, and more recently, his positing of poverty as global security issue being neglected by the U.S. and Europe in equal measure. <cite id="note_7">Bono’s op-ed piece “Ending the Poverty That Breeds Violence” in <span class="journaltitle">The New York Times</span> on February 22, 2005, argues, among other things, that the self-regarding tensions between the U.S. and Europe are useful cultural poses by those nations to indirectly blame one another for the current “crumbling” of African countries while those same powers do little about the ongoing devastation of that continent.</cite></p>
<p>Bono has opted for a clever manipulation of his fabricated rebel-in-sunglasses-and-leather persona, dispensing with political idealism (or the “essence” of his politics) in favor of deliberative action, a kind existential gamesmanship which lead one British newspaper to wonder,</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Is it possible to appear in public with the likes of Helms and Bush and preserve that precious commodity - street-cred? If it’s not, says Bono, it’s a price worth paying. “Edge was pleading with me not to hang out with the conservatives. He said, ‘You’re not going to have a picture with George Bush?’ I said I’d have lunch with Satan if there was so much at stake. I have friends who won’t speak to me because of Helms. But it’s very important not to play politics with this. Millions of lives are being lost for the stupidest of reasons: money. And not even very much money. So let’s not play, Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Let’s rely on the moral force of our arguments.” (<span class="journaltitle">Guardian Unlimited</span>)</p>
<p class="epigraph"><span class="lightEmphasis">Blame it all on the kids and the IRA<br /> While the bastards commit genocide</span><br /> -John Lennon, “The Luck of the Irish”</p>
<p class="epigraph"><span class="lightEmphasis">The Beatles are more Irish than U2!</span><br /> -Bono, <span class="journaltitle">The Irish Times</span>, December 23, 2004</p>
<p>I’ve often remarked, to friends who have been more engaged by and aware of trends in music since the 1960s, that John Lennon, that contrarian, that ironist, and that irritant, is the true godfather of punk.</p>
<p>Lennon and the Beatles <span class="lightEmphasis">invented</span> the “Summer of Love” by embracing the gospel of St. Paul (“All You Need is Love”) while dismantling God (<span class="booktitle">The White Album</span>).</p>
<p>As The Beatles parted ways, Lennon became the first and maybe last rock star to deconstruct his own celebrity, associating himself so much with The New Left in New York City in the early 1970s that he earned the attention of Nixon and the FBI. <cite id="note_8">In addition to trying to deport Lennon, the FBI also kept a file on Jimi Hendrix. The mysterious circumstances of Hendrix’s death in England in 1970 figure prominently in David Henderson’s biography <span class="booktitle">‘Scuse me While I Kiss the Sky: The Life of Jimi Hendrix</span> (Omnibus Press, 2003).</cite></p>
<p>Lennon’s “protest” songs, like “Working Class Hero,” God,” “Attica State” and even “Imagine” evoke existential rebellion, much like the way his rage marries his idealism in his 1972 solo performance of “Come Together,” which combined his “scream therapy” and his anti-war passion.</p>
<p>And so U2, in what Marshall McLuhan might call a “collective posture of mind,” have tried to mimic The Beatles and Lennon’s existential experimentation with rock stardom, often trying to re-incarnate The Beatles in their own image: <span class="booktitle">Rattle and Hum</span> features a post-punk “sequel” to “God,” and in the opening of that under-rated Phil Joanou film, Bono declares that the band is “stealing” “Helter Skelter” “back” from Charles Manson on behalf of The Beatles.</p>
<p>And in one of the most startling cross-references I’ve ever seen in a rock show, U2’s pre-9/11 performances in 2001 added to “Bullet the Blue Sky” a short film clip about the need for gun control in the U.S., while Bono infused the song with a rap as he reenacted Mark David Chapman’s 1980 murder of Lennon: “John, war is over, we don’t need your help/America’s waging war on itself… Pull the trigger on the rock-n-roll nigger/He’s bigger than Jesus on a bumper sticker.” The message, unnoticed by the musical press, was clear: an American gun killed John Lennon.</p>
<p>Bono also shares Lennon’s political habit of using the musical spotlight to call attention to the body count. Performing “Sunday Bloody Sunday” at Slane Castle (ten days before 9/11) Bono lauded the politicians who crafted the Good Friday accords and then recited the twenty-nine names of those killed in the 1998 “Real IRA” terrorist bombing in Omagh.</p>
<p>During their post-9/11 second tour of the States, they revived their 1997 song about religious war, “Please,” as it rang like a grim reminder for New Yorkers (“September/streets capsizing, spilling over and down the drain/shards of glass splinters like rain/but you can only feel your own pain”).</p>
<p>At their Super Bowl performance months later, U2 performed “Where the Streets Have No Name” as towers of red light scrolled the lists of the names of those individuals who died in Washington, Pennsylvania, and New York; as the song crested, the lights cascaded into a re-enactment of the Twin Tower’s collapse, a raw acknowledgement (at the annual celebration of the American music, television, and sports celebrity-immortality-industries) of the <span class="lightEmphasis">human</span> -fact: death. <cite id="note_9">I watched U2’s Super Bowl performance in the company of someone who escaped the South Tower minutes before her office and her officemates where struck by United Airlines Flight 175: that visceral musical/visual memorial during U2’s performance had no small emotional effect.</cite></p>
<p class="epigraph"><span class="lightEmphasis">Abandonment and displacement are the stuff of my favorite psalms. The Psalter may be a font of gospel music, but for me it’s despair that the psalmist really reveals the nature of his special relationship with God. Honesty, even to the point of anger. ‘How long, Lord? Wilt thou hide thyself forever?’ (Psalm 89), or ‘Answer me when I call’ (Psalm 5).”</span><br /> -Bono from his Introduction to The Psalms</p>
<p>New York City is the existential capital of the United States. The city’s speed and its disinterested anonymity and its famous indifference to American piety makes it the ideal space for writers and artists and musicians and thinkers to discard <span class="lightEmphasis">self</span> -importance and <span class="lightEmphasis">self</span> -referential intellectualism and be carried into new work through the city’s <span class="lightEmphasis">existential</span> energies - the constant motion, the shifting identities; in New York the winners at the capitalist game (the celebrities, the CEOs, the crooks) are bound by the same narrow streets as the proletariats and its losers: the walking workers, the pressing crowds, the musical and the homeless (often one and the same).</p>
<p>New York City is that social space which captures the existential values which music critic Paul Garon reads into the figure of the blues singer, “proud and arrogant, sure of himself or herself, relatively immune to the more absurd bourgeois conventions, a free agent, indifferent and even hostile to the Protestant ethic and the repressive ‘myths’ of ‘responsibility’ ” (<span class="booktitle">Blues and The Poetic Spirit</span> 26).</p>
<p>In 1912, under the spell of New York City’s existential fascinations, the Swiss avant-garde poet and novelist Frédéric Sauser changed his name to Blaise Cendrars, dropped into a Presbyterian church on Easter Sunday where “fashionable young girls” were singing Haydn’s Oratio: the minister interrupted the music to preach and so Cendrars left the church and proceeded to compose “Les Pâques à New-York,” in which the poet takes the Lord on a walking tour of New York’s Jewish and Chinese enclaves and introduces the Lord to the city’s “thieves” and “vagrants,” its “street singers,/The blind violinist, the one armed-organ grinder, /The straw-hat, paper-rose singer” (<span class="booktitle">Complete Poems</span> 7)</p>
<p>When Spanish poet Fernando Garcia Lorca came to New York City in the fall of 1929, he reconnected with jazz and blues gospel (American existential music, after all) which confirmed for him his ambition to return to writing poetry that would be analogous in its psychological effects to the duende of Andalusia, duende or deep song, “is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence, reminding him that ‘ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head’; [duende] brings him face-to-face with death.” (<span class="booktitle">In Search of Duende</span>, ix)</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Duende</span> is a poetry as musical fever of the body, described by Lorca as “a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice, a marvelous buccal undulation that smashes the resonant cells of our tempered scale, eludes the cold rigid staves of modern music, and makes the tightly closed flowers of the semi-tones blossom into a thousand petals.” (3)</p>
<p>Even that Mediterranean chauvinist Albert Camus loved New York City, recounting in “The Rains of New York,” how much the city intimidated him with its energies - “yes I am out of my depth” - though he found the city most ecstatic and most musical for its sky, “naked and immense, stretched to the four corners of the horizon…a jazz band of birds herald[ing] the appearance of the first star above the Empire State Building” (“The Rains of New York” 183).</p>
<p>About twenty years after Camus’ visit, John Lennon permanently re-settled in New York City, a move which music critic Anthony DeCurtis claims cured Lennon of his habits of self-pity and compelled him into political songs (for John Sinclair, for Irish republicanism, for those killed by the state police at Attica State Penitentiary), and in New York Lennon found life twinned with death, not morbidly but musically, and so like Camus, he was also captivated by the New York sky, “We are writing in the sky instead of on paper,” Lennon wrote to his fans in 1979 in <span class="journaltitle">The New York Times</span>, “that’s our song… Lift you eyes again and look around you, and you will see that you are walking in the sky, which extends to the ground.”</p>
<p>David Wojnarowicz’s <span class="booktitle">Rimbaud in New York 1978-1979</span> shows an artist and writer celebrating the bohemian paradise New York City had become, while he was perhaps intuiting the AIDS epidemic that would destroy New York’s art scene in the 1980s. In a New York City hospital in 1987, exiled Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas recruited his doctor, Olivier Ameisen, a composer, to play synthesizer while the poet, on life support and battling AIDS, composed lyrics to his doctor’s compositions, the two of them collaborating on ‘Una flor en la memoria’ and ‘Himno.’</p>
<p>Today, U2 have adopted New York City and its sky as an existential trope in their new music, even using its streets as a part-time home base, evoking the city as the starting points for the uplift of “Beautiful Day” (2000) (“the traffic is stuck/and you’re not moving anywhere/you been all over/and it’s been all over you”), to the sometimes ham-fisted poetry of “New York” (2000), to Bono’s tributes to the late Ramone brothers and CBGBs, to “The Hands That Built America,” (2002) a song of Irish Diaspora used in the film <span class="filmtitle">Gangs of New</span> York, that is also a eulogy to New York’s Irish-Americans killed on the morning Al Queda incinerated our skyscrapers: “Last saw your face in a watercolor sky/… It’s early fall, there’s a cloud on the New York skyline/Innocence dragged across a yellow line.” <cite id="note_10">The world famous CBGB nightclub is located on The Bowery in lower Manhattan. Although U2 never played CBGB, the club’s name itself is synonymous with the flourishing and eclectic New York City music scene in the late 1970s. Recently, CBGBs has fallen victim to the cutthroat real estate market in Manhattan and might have to close soon. <a href="http://www.cbgb.com/history1.htm" class="outbound">This link</a> can connect the reader to the ongoing online memoir by Hilly Kristal, the club’s owner, which describes this venue’s illustrious history.</cite></p>
<p>And U2’s live performances in Manhattan in the fall of 2004 on flatbed trucks to promote the <span class="booktitle">How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb</span> were attempts to link themselves with those power-to-the-people American street happenings and downtown rallies of Lennon’s era. Their nightcap concert on the Brooklyn waterfront, with the band no longer dressed up in American disguises of earlier years (preachers, ranch-hands, Warhol nightclub denizens, plastic action figures) evoked prosaic leather-and-fatigue ordinary working-class Joes, fellas, a latter-day waterfront of Hubert Selby’s <span class="booktitle">Last Exit to Brooklyn</span>, with self-critique-as-self-congratulations in another homage to New York, “City of Blinding Lights,” where “They’re advertising in the skies/for people like us.”</p>
<p>And in the blogs and discussion swirling around the new disk and the critical and media junket, we hear that Boy’s raw existential tone might have been partly Bono’s response to the death of his mother when the writer was fourteen years old, and Bono, performing at the Grammy’s in February 2005, made clear that <span class="booktitle">Atomic Bomb</span> ‘s most musically ambitious track “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own” was a response to the death of his father, with whom he had a strained relationship: Bob Hewson, an Irish opera tenor and postal worker lost a battle to cancer during the band’s 2001 Elevation tour.</p>
<p>So I listen to “Sometimes,” with its country-style plucking and crooning, giving way to piano-like chord progressions, as it captures a single passing-lifetime the way an opera aria might in the plea, “don’t leave me here alone” and I wonder has Bono read Rainer Maria Rilke’s fiction “How Old Timofei Died Singing,” from Stories of God, in which Rilke inverts the prodigal son parable, so the resentful, abandoned father barely has time, when his son does return, with love and regret, to teach his son the songs he has inside before he dies:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">soon after singing the most beautiful [songs] he died. He had often complained bitterly in his last days that he still carried a vast quantity of songs within him and had not time to impart them to his son…all those melodies to which no man, were he Cossack or peasant, could listen without weeping. Besides, his voice is supposed to have had such a soft and sorrowful tone as has never been heard from any other singer. (<span class="booktitle">Stories of God</span> 53)</p>
<p>The tale signals that high-modern existentialism that Rilke would use more operatically in his famous “If I Cried Out, who would hear me up there among the angelic orders?” from <span class="booktitle">Duino Elegies</span>, encouraging language to become music, in affirmations of life and death as singular, for “to admit one without the other is, as is here learned and celebrated, a limitation that in the end excludes all infinity. Death is the side of life that is turned away from us: we must try to achieve the fullest consciousness of our existence which is at home in the two unseparated realms, inexhaustibly nourished by both [death and life]” (<span class="booktitle">Duino Elegies</span> 10)</p>
<p>Music achieves this fullest consciousness of life and death as the single home of our existence.</p>
<p>And it was Rilke’s Elegies that influenced Wim Wenders’ film <span class="booktitle">Wings of Desire</span>, in which Bruno Ganz, his thick face weary of its immortality, wanders about Berlin and falls in love with a redheaded acrobat. But the trade-off for this angel involves surrendering his aspect of perfection - his angelic immortality - and so he must die in order to become human, to feel, for feeling after all is the body’s way of knowing death even though the human mind simply can’t conceptualize its body’s inherent connection to death as its biological fate.</p>
<p>Wenders’ angels in Berlin are as hauntingly captivated by human existence as Nat Mackey assures us the Sudanese suling flute is as well, for that instrument is the sound of the soul resisting incarnation (<span class="booktitle">Bedouin Hornbook</span> 96). The eye and hand cling to <span class="lightEmphasis">place</span> because undifferentiated <span class="lightEmphasis">space</span> is just too terrifying: but the ear is seduced by Sun Ra’s music, and so “The Place is Space,” or, as Rilke writes in “To Music,” “music is space that’s outgrown us/heart-space.”</p>
<p>Or as Bono has more simply put it, “the goal is soul.”</p>
<p>If consciousness often makes cowards of us all, music re-minds our bodies of death through the ecstasies its sounds work on us.</p>
<p>Noise, sound, and music everywhere: sounds one hears even in hospital delivery rooms, and in delivery rooms of that other kind and sounds that those who are sitting at deathbed vigils even right now know: thinking as I am of a cancer ward on a New York City riverfront, on an otherwise sunny cold January afternoon over a year ago, a friend “going away” too soon, thinking maybe some Frank Sinatra and The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Lenny Kravitz should be piped in for him, to go with the murmurs of the nurses up the hall, those background harmonies to the heartbeat and the labored breathing and the cold-and-clear-as-a-bell beeping of the painkiller’s drip. Then my mind drifts back to an Irish pub in Seattle in the fall of 2002 where the bartenders in anticipation of a local Irish band’s arrival, played U2’s music for four straight hours as my friend and I met drinkers and music lovers who had traveled to Seattle from as far as Yorkshire, England and as nearby as Vancouver, all of us taking turns parsing some of the song’s lyrics and musical ironies and the mystery-magic of song: “It’s a long way down to nothing at all,” Bono sings in “Stuck in a Moment” (2000).</p>
<p>We hardly know the half of it.</p>
<p>All melodies are as strange as the sound of someone passing. Or coming into birth, screaming their own songs.</p>
<p>To what or to where we will pass is anyone’s guess. The explanations of religion are inadequate to the task of enriching existence so music fills us with the mystery we need to sing, and to be. Up. And down. Like those far-off soothing chants that must be angels at the end of U2’s ballad, “Stay (Faraway, So Close!),” inspired by the images of Rilke and Wenders, much like Mackey’s musicians in <span class="booktitle">Bedouin Hornbook</span>, singing a tune “part burial song but a boat-hauling shanty as well,” which arises “from the very streets upon which we walked with no other wish than that they could somehow be our own, could somehow, that is, be as ‘outside’ as the music itself” (77), or an attempt to go to that “Upper Room ” which gospel singers sing of, though for Wenders’ angels downward to Earth works better for getting a truer life, urban angels, who have decided its time to leave perfection behind in order to be human and to feel, as close by as the local “7-11,” the final refrain summons music’s existential promise, an ecstasy of life dying into Life -</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It’s quiet and there’s no one around<br /> Just a band and clatter, as an angel runs aground<br /> Just a bang and a clatter as an angel hits the ground.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">***</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Arenas, Reinaldo. <span class="booktitle">Before Night Falls</span>, trans. by Dolores M. Koch. New York: Penguin Books, 1993</p>
<p>Bachelard, Gaston. <span class="booktitle">The Poetics of Reverie</span>, trans. Daniel Russell Boston: Beacon Press, 1969</p>
<p>Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues,” in <span class="booktitle">James Baldwin Early Stories and Novels</span>, edited by Toni Morrison Library of America, 1998</p>
<p>Beatty, Paul. <span class="booktitle">Tuff</span> Anchor Books: New York, 2000</p>
<p>Camus, Albert. <span class="booktitle">Lyrical and Critical Essays</span> edited by Philip Thod, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy New York: Vintage Books 1968</p>
<p>- - <span class="booktitle">The Stranger</span>, trans. Matthew Ward, Vintage International New York, 1988</p>
<p>- - <span class="booktitle">The Myth of Sisyphus and Other essays</span> trans. Justin O’Brien New York Vintage International, 1955</p>
<p>Cendrars, Blaise. <span class="booktitle">Complete Poems</span>, trans. Ron Padgett, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1992</p>
<p>Dylan, Bob. “Desolation Row,” <span class="booktitle">Highway 61 Revisited</span>, Special Rider music, Columbia Records, 1965</p>
<p>Dunstan, Leslie, J. <span class="booktitle">Protestantism</span>, New York: George Braziller Publisher, 1961</p>
<p>Foster, R.F. <span class="booktitle">Modern Ireland 1600-1972</span> Penguin Books: London, 1989</p>
<p>Garon, Paul. <span class="booktitle">Blues and The Poetic Spirit</span>, San Francisco: City Lights 1975</p>
<p>“Incarcerated America.” <span class="booktitle">Human Rights Watch Background Report</span>. April 2003</p>
<p>Jourdain, Roberte. <span class="booktitle">Music, the Brain and Ecstasy</span>, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997</p>
<p>Kerouac, Jack. <span class="booktitle">On the Road</span> New York: Viking Penguin, 1955</p>
<p>KRS-ONE, from Not In Our Name website. <a href="http://www.notinourname.net" class="outbound">www.notinourname.net</a> “The Temple of Hip-Hop” October 14, 2004</p>
<p>Lennon, John. “A Love Letter From John and Yoko to People Who Ask Us What, When and Why,” <span class="booktitle">The New York Times</span> May 27, 1979 republished in “Book” for <span class="booktitle">John Lennon</span> (boxed set) Capitol Records, 1998</p>
<p>Lorca, Garcia Fernando. <span class="booktitle">In Search of Duende</span>, prose selections edited and translated by Christopher Mauer, New York: New Directions Bibelot series, 1998</p>
<p>Mackey, Nathaniel. <span class="booktitle">Bedouin Hornbook</span>, LA: Sun and Moon Classics, 1996</p>
<p>Nolan, Christopher. <span class="booktitle">The Dam-Burst of Dreams</span>, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981</p>
<p>Public Enemy. “Don’t Believe the Hype,” <span class="booktitle">It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back</span>, Def Jam Records, 1988</p>
<p>“Pro Bono.” <span class="journaltitle">Guardian Unlimited</span> March 18 2002</p>
<p>Rilke, Rainer Maria. <span class="booktitle">Stories of God</span>, trans. MD Herter Norton, New York: WW Norton, 1963</p>
<p>- - <span class="booktitle">Duino Elegies</span> translated by David Young Norton New York 1978</p>
<p>Sex Pistols. “Anarchy in the UK,” <span class="booktitle">Never Mind the Bullocks</span>, Warner Brothers, 1977</p>
<p>U2 <span class="booktitle">Boy</span>, Island Records, 1981<br /> - <span class="booktitle">Pop</span> Polygram International Music, Island Records, 1996<br /> - <span class="booktitle">War</span>, Island Records, 1983<br /> - <span class="booktitle">Zooropa</span> Polygram International Music, Island Records, 1993<br /> - <span class="booktitle">Achtung Baby</span> Chappel and Co (ASCAP), Island Records, 1991<br /> - <span class="booktitle">Elevation Live from Boston</span> DVD Interscope, 2001<br /> - <span class="booktitle">All That You Can’t Leave Behind</span>, Universal International/Interscope Records, 2000<br /> - <span class="booktitle">Best of 1990-2000</span>, Universal Records/Interscope, 2002<br /> - <span class="booktitle">How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb</span>, Universal Records/Interscope, 2004</p>
<p>Yeats, William Butler. <span class="booktitle">Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth</span>, Penguin Books: London, 1993</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/keane">keane</a>, <a href="/tags/tim-keane">tim keane</a>, <a href="/tags/timothy-keane">timothy keane</a>, <a href="/tags/bono">bono</a>, <a href="/tags/u2">U2</a>, <a href="/tags/rock-and-roll">rock and roll</a>, <a href="/tags/rocknroll">rock&#039;n&#039;roll</a>, <a href="/tags/rilke">rilke</a>, <a href="/tags/camus">camus</a>, <a href="/tags/america">america</a>, <a href="/tags/beatles">beatles</a>, <a href="/tags/ireland">ireland</a>, <a href="/tags/irish">irish</a>, <a href="/tags/music">music</a>, <a href="/tags/protestant">protestant</a>, <a href="/tags/iraq">iraq</a>, <a href="/tags/war">war</a>, <a href="/tags/catholic">catholic</a>, <a href="/tags/bush">bush</a>, <a href="/tags/politic">politic</a>, <a href="/tags/beckett">beckett</a>, <a href="/tags/bachelard">bachelard</a>, <a href="/tags/barthes">barthes</a>, <a href="/tags/sartre">sartre</a>, <a href="/tags/existential">existential</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1113 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/musicsoundnoise/awake#commentsMcElroy's Metropolitan Constructionshttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/topoanalytic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Steffen Hantke</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-07-10</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>1. Like tiny knots or gatherings</h2>
<p>At the end of Joseph McElroy’s most recent novel <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> stands a description of an abalone, its shell, and how it keeps itself anchored. Able to “withstand extraordinary force” (429), the shell is composed of “calcium deposited by seawater,” which the abalone then attaches to a rock “by its own uncanny homemade cement” (429). But in this novel, no domestic arrangement, however ingeniously devised, is permanent.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The protein matrix breaks. But gradually. The abalone protein cement breaks little by little, like tiny knots or gatherings stuck together that pull out or break here and there along the length, as if this were a string. How to create materials like this in the lab. One by one the individual bonds in the abalone protein will break, but very slowly: and because, not to mention that they can re-form eventually, they break before the entire molecule does, they are called sacrificial bonds. It takes huge amounts of energy to break them. The abalone shell is three thousand times more fracture-resistant than a crystal of this very calcium carbonate it’s made of. (430)</p>
<p>Like many sentences at the end of a long novel - any novel - this one will make more sense to a reader who has traveled the entire length of the narrative and who, thus, arrives prepared at this penultimate stop. To the reader who opens the novel randomly, the passage might resonate as a kind of hermetic poetry, not unlike that of the French symbolists. Its principle of composition is carefully constructed counterpoint: the contrasts between “tiny knots” and “huge amounts of energy,” between “breaking” (“but gradually”) and “re-forming,” and between natural processes at the level of mere physics, or, at most, the level of unthinking instinct, and ingenious manufacturing of intricate structures whose properties exceed the sum of their parts.</p>
<p>Read out of context, this image of the abalone shell and its “cement” could also model a process of construction that suggests self-reflexivity - as in the type of novel that draws its raw materials from the empirical world, in which it needs to find its proper place, and arranges them in patterns that derive their solidity from the smallest units of organization. These raw materials could be experience, information, or stories - perhaps even pieces of scientific knowledge, not least the bits about shell composition. These raw materials are then fashioned into an intricate, durable, artificial structure, not unlike a house, which readers can visit and explore and where they can find temporary shelter. Though fabricated, the structure functions as part of the natural world, in the sense that it can become raw material for yet another act of creative fabrication. In an unrelated passage of the novel, we are introduced to a utopian vision of building materials that are so responsive that no further authorial presence is required: “a metal alloy itself will know when too much stress is torquing down from upstream and without any intervention it will decide that a valve a hundred feet away should kick open” (269). In all such constructions out of raw materials, the distinction between natural and cultural spheres is transcended. The construction, page by page and sentence by sentence, of self-reflexive metaphors, which abound in the novel, turn this transcendental aim into a present, exploratory, discursive practice.</p>
<p>The question is why McElroy places the self-reflexive image at the very end of this complex and at times bewildering novel. Would it not make more sense at the beginning, as a kind of guidepost to show readers what awaits them: “tiny knots or gatherings stuck together that pull out or break here and there along the length, as if this were a string”? Do we not need such a model or map at the outset of our journey? The “as if” in “as if this were a string” is crucial, because <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span>, like almost all of McElroy’s fiction, is not, in fact, a string. Though character and setting are handled conventionally, there is no linear narrative. The “string” of conventional storytelling is tied into “tiny knots” that are then stuck together.” Events are spread out over time and space, which the narrative revisits time and again. Many of these events are unclear on their first telling; they can remain ambiguous even after they have been revisited. All of these events are, in some complicated sense of the word, “history”; they are empirical certainties, whose occurrence is undisputed but whose interpretation is ongoing. They are the rock to which the abalone cements its shell. But they are also stories, told by one character to another, each time inflected and ever so gently contorted depending on who is talking and who is listening. In each retelling, stories acquire depth, resonance, complexity, and significance. This cumulative, but open-ended structuring means that the final pages of the novel are not, in fact, the end of the story; they appear at an exposed, privileged point in the text - but this does not make them more significant than a similar construction that a reader might find by opening the book at random. In a manner of speaking, the novel can be read forward or backward, but then these terms are awkward considering that there may be a chronology of events, but there is no plot in the conventional sense. To readers who need the comfort of seeing events arranged sequentially - like a string - <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> will cause severe discomfort, especially in the beginning when the novel is bringing its many pieces into position but patterns have not yet begun to emerge. Readers who are willing, however, to go along with a narrative that, impossibly, attempts to tell everything at the same time, will discover in the end that everything does indeed connect and, hence, each small narrative must be told this way. A whole world comes into existence at once, fully formed and of infinite variety. Witnessing this remarkable experience is worth a little wait, a little work.</p>
<h2>2. How to create materials like this in the lab</h2>
<p>Wanting to transcend the juxtaposition of natural and cultural worlds, the metaphor of the abalone is nonetheless tilted toward the natural. To counteract this tilting, McElroy introduces the metaphor of a tent, which recurs repeatedly throughout <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span>. Made out of “Middle Eastern material,” this tent is, strictly speaking, the “roof of the Jedda airport” (349). Conceived on a scale that “would once have been assumed to be an American project” (166), this structure “provides shade for 105 acres of desert to shelter hundreds of thousands of pilgrims deplaning at the Haj terminal” (169). Like the shell of the abalone, the Jedda roof is a structure designed to shelter and protect. What tilts this architectural marvel toward a self-reflexive metaphor are “four and a half million square feet of fabric drawn taut as drumskin to the endless curving across hundreds of masts and cables” (349). Looking up at the structure, we might notice “hundreds of workers tightening it, trial-and-error pre-stressing this incredible -” at which point Bill Daley, the novel’s protagonist, jumps in to fill the ellipsis: “Tent” (349). Like the abalone’s precariously solid anchor, the structure in Jedda conjures up the idea of destruction by way of its solidity: “Imagine coated fiberglass strands impervious to stress and weather and relays of concussion” (169).</p>
<p>In this description, we again recognize the novel itself: a vast and complex structure, anchored by a large number of interconnected fixed points, and maintained, animated, or inhabited by a large number of characters who perform exploratory, tentative movements along the surface “curvature.” These characters are not be confused with the actual users or inhabitants of the structure, the “pilgrims deplaning at the Haj terminal.” While the workers are the characters, the pilgrims are the readers, travelers in pursuit of some larger truth, temporarily seeking shelter inside this particular structure before moving on to the next, or perhaps final destination.</p>
<p>Grand and self-descriptive as this metaphor may seem at first, the structure, despite its size, is ultimately something very simple. We might be awed by its complexity, but we are also to understand that it is, like the tent it resembles, nothing more than a high-tech manifestation of an essential human archetype. One might think here of the work of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who has explored houses (and seashells) for their mythic and archetypical significance within poetic discourse in his book <span class="booktitle">The Poetics of Space</span> (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Bachelard calls this exploration “topoanalysis,” by which he means “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives,” and which he considers an “auxiliary of psychoanalysis” (8). <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> could be considered a poetic execution of Bachelard’s project because it revolves around the two poles of Bachelard’s thinking - being “cast into the world,” and with it into the mechanisms of history, and being “laid in the cradle of the house” and thus living the parts of our lives that are personal, intimate, or secret (<span class="booktitle">The Poetics of Space</span> 7).</p>
<p>Just as the tent is archetypically conflated with the house of the novel’s title, the Jedda airport terminal is also, McElroy reminds us a “giant skin” (349), an image that links tent and house with the human body and thus falls right in with Bachelard’s topoanalytic insistence on “the maternal features of the house” (<span class="booktitle">The Poetics of Space</span> 7). Contingent with this refocusing on the single human body, is a broadening of the metaphor toward the entire city of New York, a metropolis, a mother city, and the main setting of the novel. New York is itself a “haunted house” (233) absorbing the characters into deep intimacy: “…even the street tar smell approaching the piers asked of him nothing more than to be part of it with its Gotham history” (79). In one passage, we find out that there are “unseen and unknown windows in the Manhattan metamorphic base rock” (386), the “window” reference linking the city to a single house. This house, then, in turn is linked to individual bodies, which are anchored in place, often by houses like Daley’s, or unanchored and cast adrift, like Becca, who is about to be evicted from her New York apartment.</p>
<p>Architecturally speaking, the Jedda airport terminal is also a “big top” (349), a phrase that spins the image of the tent toward theatrical performance, especially the acrobatic, dance-like act of the circus performer. This links the image simultaneously with the theater, the place temporally inhabited by the Canadian actress Becca Lang, who is one of the novel’s two main characters, and it connects it to the Dance Company of Della, late wife of lawyer Bill Daley. For him, the Jedda airport is also reminiscent of a giant umbrella (“ ‘Same idea,’” one of the characters quips [350]). This portable shelter also reminds Daley of a mugging during which he defended himself against his attackers with a tattered umbrella.</p>
<h2>3. A little abuse went a long way. (So did a lot.)</h2>
<p>This attempted mugging is another one of the “tiny knots” or “gatherings” in the novel, but it is a knot that gathers images of disintegration, assault, damage, and violent break-ups. The single incident of the slap in the opening passage gathers around itself stories of shocks and slaps, bumps and beatings, explosions and earthquakes. There is a temblor rumbling underneath the city of New York, an event referred to once as a “negligible Northeast Corridor disturbance” (55), elsewhere as “a dragon having a minor nightmare at six in the morning underfoot” (165). Daley’s brother Wolf has “absorbed shock waves nearly lethal from a ship that blew up in a Japanese harbor [Osaka] while he was engaged in underwater repair analysis” (46). A scuffle between Wolf and an Australian construction worker ends with the man being backhanded (68). And there is even a moment when, still asleep, Daley “threw out his arm to feel her [i.e. Becca] there and he smote her and she objected but didn’t much wake” (282).</p>
<p>The relationship between Daley and Becca, long before they end up sleeping next to each other, starts with a “jolt” before it starts with a slap. It is the jolt of recognition after Becca fires the lawyer who was initially to represent her (29), and it is the “hidden cost or jolt coming” to Daley, when she calls him to enlist his services (35-6). Like underground rumblings that announce the shock to come, these events occur before the reader encounters the one event that, of all shocks and concussions, stands at the beginning - on the novel’s very first page. It is an image that complements the shell of the abalone and its solid foundation, the giant tent at Jedda and the protection from the elements it provides. “Shock, that’s all it was, in the darkened house” (7). This is a brief moment onstage, when Becca is slapped a little too hard, beyond what’s required by the play. The slap will reverberate throughout the novel; it is what brings Daley and Becca together. Radiating out from each of these two are ever-widening circles of characters: Daley’s late wife Helen and her fellow dancers, Becca’s half-brother Bruce, Daley’s brother Wolf and his family, Becca’s colleagues in the theater, and so forth.</p>
<p>Apart from supplying the initial energy needed for these characters to arrange and rearrange themselves in steadily self-renewing configurations; apart from revealing hidden or unsuspected configurations that had already existed, the slap - the initiating shock - also provides dynamic counterpoint to the closing, static image of the abalone’s shell. The slap highlights kinesis at the beginning, while stasis seems to stand at the end. Yet to put the contrast like this is to misleadingly suggest suggests closure of a type that only applies to linear narratives, a coming-to-rest that follows the period in which narrative energy has depleted itself. However, as with the dissolving of the distinction between nature and culture, each one of these two images - the abalone shell, and the slap on stage - carries in itself the shadow of its complement. The abalone, try as it might to come to rest, will break its “individual bonds,” one by one. The breakup, though slow, may end up taking “huge amounts of energy,” perhaps more energy, in sum, than the punctuated slap in the novel’s opening. Daley realizes that, as “Becca’s other life insinuate[s] itself toward him […] these people and enterprises all linked like street noises or evidence” (180), the two of them will eventually separate again. The slap, in other words, carries energy that brings them together and then separates them again.</p>
<p>Conversely, the opening kinetic image of the slap carries the shadow of stasis: we are, after all, “in the darkened house.” Contained and sheltered like the animal in a shell of its own making, the woman on stage and “the man in the eighth row” are static, frozen in this brief moment of violence. Stasis and kinesis are contained within each other, as McElroy’s narrator, momentarily sharing Daley’s subjectivity, reminds us: “At one blow it all goes to pieces. A blow like that. It says it all. But what? It all comes together” (7).</p>
<p>Conceptualizing this difficult embracing of opposites in a concrete image, McElroy ends the story for his protagonists, Bill Daley and Becca Lang, at a moment when their separation is imminent - “At one blow it all goes to pieces” - but still indefinitely postponed: “It all comes together.” An image of static kinesis, or kinetic stasis. Becca walks in on Daley as he is doing small repairs to his house, standing on a ladder in a pose that reminds her of a diver’s about to leap off the end of a board: “the whole body stretching, exposed […] this inertially forward back dive in toward the board on the way down clearing the end of the board just” (425). All polar opposites seem suspended in this pose. It moves forward, yet doubles back toward its point of origin. It is dynamic, yet inert. It is aesthetic, yet assumed spontaneously, unthinkingly, without premeditation - much like the abalone as it produces its shell and the cement to anchor it.</p>
<p>As effortless as this pose might seem, there are real dangers involved - “cracked neck, scraped face, chest and thigh abrasions.” These dangers hark back to the breaking of the submolecular bonds in the shell of the abalone: damage may occur in ways that leave the whole structure intact. But they also remind us of the body’s fragility in ways that are more obvious and immediate. Daley himself is mugged, his arm sliced open during a morning run through his neighborhood. Daley’s late wife Della dies of cystic fibrosis, her body disintegrating through a disease that is uncannily reminiscent of the description of the Jedda airport with its “coated fiberglass strands impervious to stress and weather and relays of concussion.” Prompted by Becca, Daley remembers an incident from the Vietnam War, during which prisoners in transit to a place of interrogation are thrown out of the helicopter in mid-air. Most significantly perhaps, the novel’s last page features a conversation between Daley and Becca in which both muse about the earthquake underneath New York. “They say a 7 quake is a two-thousand-year event. Two thousand years from when?” (432). The prospect, in the event, is grim: “Bricks in the streets. Whole facades down […] Even a steel-framed high rise, which would be the most stable - think of what’s going on at ground level, gas mains, fires….” One cannot help wondering if this passage, written by an author who lives a few blocks up from the former location of the World Trade Center, does not refer, however obliquely, to shocks and “abrasions” that are less personal and more collective. (McElroy writes on 9/11 in ebr <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/parallel">end construction</a>.) Shocks that are both symbolic and frighteningly literal at the same time. That the novel resorts to such ominous scenes of violence is necessary because the slap in the beginning is so highly stylized as to be almost immaterial. Only the fact that the inherent force of the blow seems “over the line” draws attention to it at all (8). This “line” that physical violence crosses, and the more symbolic forms of violence on the other side, preoccupies the novel. This preoccupation is another self-reflexive move on McElroy’s part because it concerns the question of what impact, what shock, the novel itself can have. Can a purely metaphoric act such as writing or reading a novel cross this line and generate a material impact in the world?</p>
<p>Before her death of cystic fibrosis, Della Daley gets involved with a dance project in which the bodies of the performers collide deliberately and dangerously with the material barriers around them. Though nobody gets hurt, the performance simulates trauma by approximating trauma, modeling the fragility of the human body in an indifferently material world. Dissolving the boundary between the dancer and the dance, McElroy calls it an “unusual show of gravity but with walls to slam themselves against, this wild, disciplined rough-work straight-faced group” (359). Gravity itself, the novel suggests, is a source of injury, but art may seize it, mold it into “great paths, curves, inertial, intersecting” (418), and hand it back to us as a conscious experience, stripped of some of its ominous force.</p>
<h2>4. It was somewhat decentralized, how it all networked</h2>
<p>While the elegantly curved surfaces of <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> move the reader forward and backward along thematic lines, McElroy’s experiment with narrative structure nevertheless induces a sense of interpretive paranoia. Not for a moment does structure itself step into the background. Eventually, statements scattered throughout the text that would seem straightforward in another novel acquire uncanny depth. These added layers of significance are always and everywhere self-reflexive. “It was somehow decentralized, how it all networked,” is one such sentence, describing Becca as someone who, like an ideal reader, is capable of learning “it all without meaning to” (126). In reference to Lincoln’s body coming ashore in New York, Daley muses, “At the center […], I can’t imagine what that was like” (135), a thought all the more puzzling for a character who, as the protagonist, should in fact be at the center. In another passage, Becca declares that “a walk had no aim but wasn’t aimless’ ” (254). Becca’s one-woman play she is planning for the time after her run at the theater is described as being “no tale really, only experience” (208). And in a passage of such dazzling linguistic play that it is worthwhile quoting at length, jazz musicians are described as separately “jettisoning a succession of milling around bop-like flights and halfway volcanic omnidirectional grinding that in self-defense against the no-man’s-land of tonal centers (what the Free Guys called them) you could feel oddly closer to the person you were with barraged, instructed, not hardly borne along because what kind of vehicle [sic] was this?” (285)</p>
<p>The novel’s poetic language strives for abstraction, returning to images of decentralized networks, aimless yet purposeful movement in multiple directions, an overarching sense of human and informational intimacy, and a weighing against each other of feeling “barraged” and being “instructed.” The type of self-referentiality performed in the jazz passage does not open a parallel space to the novel’s discourse, an alternate frame of reference. Devoid of irony -though not without humor - these metaphors do not undermine textual integrity; they do not draw attention to the author’s artifice. Their occurrence constitutes a search for order where the search is itself a part of the order.</p>
<p>Critics who read passages like this one as hermetic or exclusionary might take them as symptoms of the author’s self-awareness - specifically, the author’s awarness of his own difficulty. Drawing the readers’ attention to the compositional and philosophical principles behind the writing, McElroy might appear to be launching a pre-emptive strike against nagging critics. That such ambivalence exists even among readers appreciative of McElroy’s creative risk-taking becomes fairly obvious in the <a class="outbound" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0323/essex.php"><span class="journaltitle">Village Voice</span></a> review of <span class="booktitle">Actress</span> (May 20, 2003). Calling McElroy “the polymorphously difficult American novelist who, after a 15-year absence, has just released his eighth book,” reviewer Andrew Essex admits that he “was excited to plow into new McElroy,” but then adds: “Having finally finished, I can’t say I enjoyed myself. Then again, who said reading is supposed to be easy? Or maybe that’s just my problem.” Essex calls <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> “a novel of such astonishing complexity that it is almost unreadable, and I mean that as a compliment.” He goes on, “In <span class="booktitle">Actress</span>, nothing is illuminated, and McElroy’s purpose seems to delight in never so much as winking in the direction of ease.”</p>
<p>Unlike such critics assuming the pose of the common reader, academic critics have often described such narrative movements and informational “curvatures” in language approximate to the novel’s own language. Tom LeClair, for example, in his study <span class="booktitle">The Art of Excess</span>, mobilizes the discourse of systems theory in grappling with McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>, a chapter of which is titled “Reformulation,” after McElroy’s own term, “formulation.” (“For McElroy, formulation essentially means `theoretical explanation’ of experience and abstraction […], two modes of creating encompassing and systemic wholes,” <span class="booktitle">The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction</span>, Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989: page 132). Admittedly, I myself have taken my cue from McElroy in starting to read <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> from the last page to the first (“omnidirectional […] in self-defense against the no-man’s-land of tonal center”). Terms such as “narrative movements” and “informational `curvatures’ ” have started sneaking into my own sentences. I take this assimilation of the novel’s diction, which is inseparable from the book’s larger compositional structure, as a sign that McElroy does actually succeed in integrating the level of metafictional discourse, in the form of the self-reflexive metaphors and reflections scattered throughout the text, into the level of discourse that constitutes the novel’s plot. It is not so much that McElroy’s writing performs the readers’ act of critical interpretation for them; that it pre-empts them, outdoes them, or overpowers them. Instead, McElroy’s language suggests a poetic reconstruction of the world that is at first strange and unsettling, yet becomes increasingly convincing and thus epistemologically compelling - compelling enough to begin shaping one’s own thought on other questions. Formulation is not separate from McElroy’s plot but is identical with it. Surprisingly, McElroy’s embrace of theoretical explanation and its language does not make the writing at all dry, academic, or even pedantically didactic; readers will find it rather lively, vivid, rich in detail and incident. McElroy’s accomplishment lies in the marriage of the conceptual and the concrete - but then we knew that from the self-reflexive metaphors that announced his aesthetics as early as on the last, and as persistently as on the first page of <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span>.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/leclair">leclair</a>, <a href="/tags/complexity">complexity</a>, <a href="/tags/chaos">chaos</a>, <a href="/tags/bachelard">bachelard</a>, <a href="/tags/poetics">poetics</a>, <a href="/tags/topoanalytic">topoanalytic</a>, <a href="/tags/topology">topology</a>, <a href="/tags/topography">topography</a>, <a href="/tags/jedda">jedda</a>, <a href="/tags/village-voice">village voice</a>, <a href="/tags/reflexivity">reflexivity</a>, <a href="/tags/andrew-harris">andrew harris</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern">postmodern</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator871 at http://electronicbookreview.com